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So what does an IT Operations Manager do, again?

Since the title of my blog is "TheOpsMgr" I thought I should at least define what an "Ops Mgr" (Operations Manager) actually IS (or at least in terms of my current job).

Because I work for a small-ish online publishing company (about 200 people, with about 35 people in the Technology team) the Operations role is best defined as by a negative - "Operations is everything the Developers and the Project Managers DON'T do...".

Most people have a fairly instinctive grasp of what Developers and Project Managers do - developers "develop stuff" (that becomes the new websites in our case) and PM's "manage stuff" (the projects that the developers work on).

But what about the rest of the job of managing the day to day operations of the websites (or any other IT system)?

The Operations function that most users would be familiar with is the "help desk" (or service desk as it tends to be called these days) but this is only the visible tip of the Operations function - the other nine tenths of the iceberg is submerged where the users rarely see (or for the more cynical, rarely care unless it goes wrong!).

More on this later...

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